It may come as a surprise to some to be told that the modern digital computer is really quite old in concept, and the year 1984 will be celebrated as the 150th anniversary of the invention of the first computer the Analytical Engine of the Englishman Charles Babbage. One hundred and fifty years is really quite a long period of time in terms of modern science and industry and, at first glance, it seems unduly long for new concept to come into full fruition. Unfortunately, Charles Babbage was ahead of his time, and it took one hundred years of technical development, the impetus of the second World War and the perception of John Von Neumann to bring the computer into being. Now twenty years later and with several generations of computer behind us, we are in a position to make a somewhat more meaningful prognosis than appeared possible in, say 1948. We can only hope that we will not be as far off actuality as we believe George Orwell to be, or as far off in our time scale as were Charles Babbage and his almost equally famous interpreter, Lady Lovelace.

The primary goal of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is to understand how computers can be made to exhibit intelligence. Two corollary goals are to make computers more useful and to understand certain aspects of human intelligence. Current research includes work on computer robotics and vision, expert systems, learning and commonsense reasoning, natural language understanding, and computer architecture.

Editors' Note: Many expert systems require some means criticisms of this approach from those steeped in the practical of handling heuristic rules whose conclusions are less than certain issues of constructing large rule-based expert systems. Abstract the expert system draws inferences in solving different problems. Doyle's paper argues that it is difficult for a human expert "certainty factors," and in spite of the experimentally observed insensitivity of system performance to perturbations of the chosen values Recent successes of "expert systems" stem from much Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 3597, monitored In the following, we explain the modified approach together with its practical and theoretical attractions. The client's income bracket is 50%, can be found (Minsky, 1975; Shortliffe & Buchanan, 1975; and 2. The client carefully studies market trends, Duda, Hart, & Nilsson, 1976; Szolovits, 1978; Szolovits & THEN: 3. There is evidence (0.8) that the investment Pauker, 1978). Reasoned Assumptions (from Davis, 1979) and would use the rule to draw conclusions whose "certainty factors" depend on the observed certainty Although our approach usually approximates that of Bayesian probabilities, accommodates representational systems based on "frames" namely as subjective degrees of belief.

Among the difficulties in evaluating AI-type medical diagnosis systems are: the intermediate conclusions of the AI system need to be looked at in addition to the "final " answer ; the "superhuman human" fallacy must be guarded against ; and methods for estimating how the approach will scale upwards to larger domains are needed. We propose to measure both the accuracy of diagnosis and the structure of reasoning, the latter with a view to gauging how well the system will scale up.

This article describes a theory of reasoning about uncertainly, based on a representation of states of certainly called endorsements. The theory of endorsements is an alternative to numerical methods for reasoning about uncertainly, such as subjective Bayesian methods (Shortliffe and Buchanan, 1975; Duda hart, and Nilsson, 1976) and Shafer-dempster theory (Shafer, 1976). The fundamental concern with numerical representations of certainty is that they hide the reasoning about uncertainty. While numbers are easy to propagate over inferences, what the numbers mean is unclear. The theory of endorsements provide a richer representation of the factors that affect certainty and supports multiple strategies for dealing with uncertainty.

Various groups of ascertainable individuals have been granted the status of "persons" under American law, while that status has been denied to other groups. This article examines various analogies that might be drawn by courts in deciding whether to extend "person" status to intelligent machines, and the limitations that might be placed upon such recognition. As an alternative analysis, this article questions the legal status of various human/machine interfaces, and notes the difficulty in establishing an absolute point beyond which legal recognition will not extend.

The third national conference promotes research in the field of AI by bringing together individuals from government, industry, and academia and by providing a published record of the conference as proceedings.

Minutes of the Third Annual Meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

Our group's work in medical decision making has led us to formulate a framework for expert system design, in particular about how the domain knowledge may be decomposed into substructures. We propose that there exist different problem-solving types, i.e., uses of knowledge, and corresponding to each is a separate substructure specializing in that type of problem-solving. This is in contrast to the currently dominant expert system paradigm which proposes a common knowledge base accessed by knowledge-free problem-solvers of various kinds. In novice, these expert structures are often incomplete, and other knowledge structures and learning processes are needed to construct and complete them.

The Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research (FLAIR) was inaugurated in October, 1980, with the purposes of introduction AI Technology into Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, and of broadening the AI base of its parent company, Schlumberger Ltd. The charter of the laboratory includes basic and applied research in all AI disciplines. Currently, we have significant efforts underway in several areas of computational perception, knowledge representation and reasoning, and AI-related architectures. The current computational environment includes several large mainframes dedicated to AI research, a number of high-performance personal scientific machines, and extensive graphics capabilities.